what's limiting my gaming performance?

almoststew1990

almoststew1990

almoststew1990

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Ive cobbled together the following gear and put a fresh xp install on with Sp3, steam and not much else.

Q6600 @3.3GHz
4GB DDR2 @ 730MHz or something
1GB ATI 5870
1080p screen.

In games such as Mafia II and Fallout NV I get good frame rates if I stay still. When I start moving around and new stuff has to load in (I guess?) I start to get stuttering. What do you think is the limiting factor?

It happens a little less when I lower the settings. Overclocking from 2.4 to 3.3 also only helped a little bit.

This is a secondary PC I have infront of my exercise bike so I won't be doing a big upgrade or anything.
 
Interesting, I thought xp wouldnt use more than 1GB of RAM and those games use more than 2GB, unless it doesn't work like that? Is there a way to check?

I take it RAM speed doesn't matter?
It is worth noting that I havw 4x 1GB, two of which are 800MHz and two of which are 660MHz, all of which are different timing s but all seem to work together OK...
 
you could alt/tab your way out of the game and look in task manager to see how much ram usage

its been a while since I used xp,but on win7 with an i3 540 and 4gb of ram I got terrible stuttering in la noire,soon as I stuck in 8gb it was smooth,that was using a 7850 gpu

not sure if all sticks would default to 660mhz (1320mhz) either
 
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I used to have similar problems with GTA4 on an old laptop. It turned out it was the slow HDD that was loading things like textures too slowly.

Upgrading to 8gb of ram is only really worth it if you want to keep that system quite a while longer as it uses DDR2 ram which you wont be able to put in to newer motherboards and it is quite expensive to buy in the first place.
 
almoststew1990 said:
Interesting, I thought xp wouldnt use more than 1GB of RAM and those games use more than 2GB, unless it doesn't work like that? Is there a way to check?

I take it RAM speed doesn't matter?
It is worth noting that I havw 4x 1GB, two of which are 800MHz and two of which are 660MHz, all of which are different timing s but all seem to work together OK...
Click to expand...

Xp wont use more then 2gig of ram on a single app

i say it sounds like a hard drive problem maybe time to jump on to Windows 7 [64bit] and an SSD your hardware is still fine for it
 
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Its a WD or Maxtor 500GB SATA from 2009 or 10- I can confirm when I get home from work.

Is there a way to test the health of the HDD in terms of gaming performance? I have a 250GB HDD hanging around but that is an even older Seagate one.

Could it be a lack of or problem with VRAM? The textured might be able to get out of the HDD fine but not find their way into the 1GB VRAM?
 
dreigns said:
Xp wont use more then 2gig of ram on a single app
Click to expand...

Wrong.
App != thread, so multithreaded application can use upto 2GB per thread each, but in 32-bit XP with no PAE it's going to be less than 4GB in total.

HDD check: firts - SMART report (HD Tune, Crystal Disk Info), and chkdsk against badblocks and filesystem errors. Second - free space; if your files are located @ end of drive (physically it would be @ beginning where platters rotate with slower linear speed, but it's transparent to user which has got reversed "view") so their access time is higher = which means lower speed. You might try to set up swap file for constant value, like 1024MB for example, and move it to first or second (if first is pure system) partition = this helps a little, if you can't use more than 4GB of physical memory having 32-bit XP.

Memory check: CPU-Z program. DDR-2/800 is a standard, so if you oc-ed CPU with FSB, memory bus will raise as well. Sometimes when you oc too much for memory, its divider needs to be lowered, so it's why memory speed sometimes (when motherboard has got just few memory dividers in BIOS) is lower than stock one. Check which memory you've got with CPU-Z program, memory and SPD tab and make corrects, if any.

For FullHD res I'd say it's rather 2GB VRAM issue. But before you change your card - check it first, if you've got any friend with 2GB VRAM card to borrow. Don't forget about BIOS update - it should be latest one all the time.
 
At some point I'll put my 7970 from my proper PC in the Q6600 PC and put the 5870 in the proper PC. Proper PC has haswell i7, 8GB of 2133MHz RAam and an SSD so this could rule out a few of the possible causes.

Edit- just remembered I still get stuttering at 720p with low settings so :/
 
Between the Q6600 and the 5870, the Q6600 would bottleneck the 5870, particular with the two games you mention only uses around 2 threads or 2 cores.

A 5870 would need a Q6600 at around 3.60GHz using all 4 cores to make the most out of it.
 
Swapped over my gpu- I have the same stuttering problem with the 7970. Looking St the 'adjusted/ realistic' required specs for Mafia 2, even the c2q beats it by a country mile. I might look into getting a small SSD on the members market.

first I'm going to try the 2GB of matching RAM only- the required specs say 2GB rrecommended and on the basis I have a very lite install ATM I would have thought that RAM quantity with 2GB wouldn't be an issue.
 
its your pc memory imo,4gb simply aint enough for modern games

remember to use a 64bit os to make use of more than 3.5gb though,you'll find games will run smooth then,my 7850 had 2gb of vram yet it still stuttered with only 4gb pc memory
 
Marine-RX179 said:
Between the Q6600 and the 5870, the Q6600 would bottleneck the 5870, particular with the two games you mention only uses around 2 threads or 2 cores.

A 5870 would need a Q6600 at around 3.60GHz using all 4 cores to make the most out of it.
Click to expand...

+1 My E8400 @ 4.0 GHz, was still holding back it's HD 5870. So on games limited to 2 core performance the Q6600 is a significant factor.
 
If you have AV turned on, you could try disabling the on access scanning or excluding the folders. Defrag *may* help, even if it's a great placebo :p In this instance logically contiguous files for games that are large may load slightly quicker.

I had no issues with the 5870 even with 1GB it was enough for Metro LL. Mafia was fine on it. Keep an eye on max memory use/page file when running, with a 1GB card and 32 bit XP you're probably down to 2.75GB RAM left for windows.
 
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